Many concerned readers have written to the Dancing Henry editorial offices recently, afraid that we might be affected by the ongoing economic crisis. Unfortunately, it is true that the Dancing Henry Corporation has had to make cutbacks. Our publishing department has ceased printing once lucrative titles such as the A-Z of Numbers textbook, the Braille Guide to Silent Film and the Best of Ceefax Annual. Our merchandising department has now stopped manufacturing our range of Sir Henry Drummond action figures, our Months of the Year socks, and our famous spearmint bananas. And throughout the company we have made other minor cutbacks, including our library of betamax cassettes, our female employees and our electronic pistachio-sheller. We appreciate your letters of support during this difficult time, however we kindly request that concerned readers pay for postage before mailing. Thank you.
ELECTRONIC MEMORANDUMS
RE: The Dancing Henry Story… in colour!
If you’d like a second chance to see “The Dancing Henry Story”, a twenty-four-part TV mini-series chronicling Dancing Henry founder Sir Henry Drummond’s struggle to create the Dancing Henry Almanac, despite resistance from censorship organisations, rival publishers, the church, heavy winds and gravity – then we would welcome funding for the £2.5 million production, giving you your first chance to see it as well.
RE: The Dancing Henry Almanac has moved!
We are pleased to announced that the Dancing Henry Almanac has found a new home at DancingHenryAlmanac.com.
As well as transferring our digital operations we have also moved our prodigious archives to a new facility close to Geneva. The 110,000 item strong collection of manuscripts, curios and unused plastic takeaway cutlery that makes up the Henry Drummond Archive requires a long-term secure storage solution which will preserve its many important artefacts for the enjoyment of future generations, and for several years a team of Dancing Henry researchers has struggled to find appropriate facilities. But, as luck would have it, a team in Switzerland recently discovered several miles of abandoned underground tunnels, most likely built during the war for the storage of Nazi gold, which provide more than adequate space for the collection, and has even retained a high-functioning energy supply perfect for the running of our dehumidifiers. Now that the team are finally settled in to their new home, they can get back to their regular work, and start on the big task of catching up with all those cultural and scientific developments they must have missed out on in the last few years!
Many concerned readers have written to inquire whether the Dancing Henry Almanac is carbon-neutral. We are delighted to reassure you all that not only are we not carbon-neutral in the slightest, but we have gone one better and are opposed to carbon in all forms.
The Dancing Henry organisation has always been a trendsetter (one of the first, in fact), and our anti-carbon policy was put in place long before the rise of the so-called ‘green’ movement. In 1953, a scientific study commissioned by Dancing Henry founder Sir Henry Drummond to investigate the physical make-up of members of the most reviled groups on Earth (including Nazis, Gay Catholics, and Vegetarians Who Eat Fish) found that a significant portion of their body mass was carbon-based. Shortly after, Sir Henry instituted a policy forbidding the drinking of carbonated drinks, the breathing of carbon dioxide, and the making of carbon copies in the Dancing Henry offices. A hastily scrawled memo also led to an accidental prohibition on car bonnets in the Dancing Henry car park which remains in place even today.
After almost a month of bunking off in the snow, the Dancing Henry editorial team reluctantly trudged indoors this week to hang up their sledges and prepare another fabulous series of entries from the world-famous Dancing Henry Almanac. They were greeted by a veritable mountain of letters and postcards, and promptly got their sledges back out to continue the party indoors. Though this still-snowballing pile of correspondence is currently blocking the entrance to the Dancing Henry archives, we have managed to throw together a few bits and pieces telegraphed to us by our global team this week, and present them now under the proviso that they be taken with a pinch of salt. We will return to our process of rigorous cataloguing and fact-checking in due course; in the meantime, please rest assured that any correspondence received this week will be properly processed, and will certainly not be shredded and built into a snowman.
The Dancing Henry editorial office has received much correspondence this week asking for our thoughts on illusionist Derren Brown’s impressive ability to predict the national lottery and suggesting that this stunt warrants an entry in the almanac. Long time readers will know better, however, as many of them will have received the free supplement with volume 57 of the twelfth edition of the almanac that contains unfailingly correct predictions for every lottery until 2016 (the numbers generated with a formula created by Dancing Henry founder Sir Henry Drummond himself: asking a politician, or a feminist, or some other “damn fool” what they thought the numbers would be, and then picking the exact opposite). Unfortunately for many of you, this supplement is now out of print, as the Dancing Henry Organisation was simply unable to come up with a way of generating the extra revenue to keep it going.